Review: YotaPhone 2

You're being busy on your phone—texting, writing emails, occasionally checking Facebook. But your taps and swipes are cautious. You're growing more anxious by the minute. Your battery is about to die.

This has certainly happened to each and every one of you. It's happened to me countless times, usually at the airport while waiting for delayed flights with no free outlets to charge up. (When will people learn to share?)

But the last time I found myself stranded at the airport unable to charge up, I wasn't worried. I was multitasking: I had Spotify in my ears while checking emails, browsing Twitter, Facebook, and the Web. After four hours of intense usage I was still seated in front of the flight information display with 80 percent of battery life. Amazing.

How was I capable of such feats of smartphone strength? I was using the new YotaPhone 2, a dual-screen device: Along with the main AMOLED display, there's a second, E-Ink screen on the back. This sharp e-paper display requires such little power, when you employ it to perform text-based tasks, you'll see longer than average battery life times. Way longer.

The Russian smartphone is the first dual-screen phone around—well, technically, it's the second one, since this is its second generation, following the first one we saw in Las Vegas nearly two years ago. But that early prototype has matured into a real consumer device that's just now hitting the market. It's already available in the U.K and across Europe, and it will be coming to the US soon. It's very expensive, though: 699 Euro, or about $865.

If you glance at the YotaPhone 2 from the front, you'll see an ordinary, average Android phone running a stock version of KitKat. The 5-inch display here is a gorgeous AMOLED panel with 1920x1080 resolution and 442 ppi. It's very nice, with deep blacks and bright colors, good viewing angles, pretty good sunlight readability, and no significant reflections.

But flip the phone over and you'll find the peculiar second screen: an always-on electronic paper display with 16 levels of grayscale. It is a curved, fully touch-sensitive 4.7-inch panel made with Gorilla Glass 3. The resolution is 960x540 with 235 ppi; in comparison, the display on Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite features the same technology, with a slightly lower 212 ppi resolution. The new Kindle Voyage is 300 ppi, sharper than the YotaPhone 2.

There's much more to do than read books here, though. You can use the rear screen to check messages, read email, see notifications, browse Twitter. How you set up the two displays is a personal matter: You'll quickly find yourself using the E-Ink screen instead of the AMOLED for a bunch of activities you'd never have thought about. Checking Google Maps, for instance: you can have your navigation always on and use as much as one percent of battery life every hour. Scrolling through your Twitter timeline? Sure. Or even Spotify—is color really necessary when you want to dig up a particular song? How many times a day do you unlock the phone for that exact same reason?

Given the main smartphone screen is accountable for most of the drain on battery life, the option to turn it on only when you actually need to is wonderful. Also, the e-paper display is designed to reflect the light rather than emit it, so it requires nearly no power to work—the one caveat being that you won't be able to read it in low light or no-light conditions.

The layout of the rear display is fully customizable according to your tastes, too. You can set up to four different "YotaPanels" and move between them by swiping the display horizontally, just like you already do to change home screens on Android. On these panels, you can pin widgets, frequently-used contacts, apps, and phone functions. Dozens of preset widgets come on the phone, including clocks, RSS feeds, weather, calendar, an agenda, mail, SMS, music—everything organized with preconfigured options and fitted on grids that you can tweak.

When it comes to privacy, one tap is enough to bring down the YotaCover, a sort of screensaver that leaves on only quick access to the phone, messages, email and notifications without showing any further details. Images for the cover can be chosen from your Facebook or Instagram accounts, local storage, or a library of default images.

Only a few applications are already engineered to be displayed on the rear display. There's Twitter, an RSS reader and four games: 2048, chess, checkers, and sudoku. But you can actually run any app on the back through the YotaPhone's mirroring mode: Just long-press the Home button to send whatever is on the AMOLED straight to the e-paper display. The camera, for instance: forget about the 2.1-megapixel front camera, since you can use the main 8-megapixel shooter to get better selfies. The e-paper display is fine for framing your shot.

That main camera, by the way, shoots fairly average pictures. Shots suffer from a lack of vibrancy and sharpness, and less frequently, from imprecise focus. I found I could achieve slightly better results after spending some time hacking options and settings.

The hardware is suitable for just about anything you'd want to do. The YotaPhone 2 features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 2.2 GHz quad-core processor, 32GB of storage on board (no microSD expansion slot), and 2GB of RAM. I was able to play a bunch of different games on the AMOLED display with no frame rate hiccups.

The battery charges wirelessly. It's just 2500 mAh, but still a solid base, given the paltry energy consumption of the electronic paper display. But even if that's not enough to make it through the day, an energy-saving feature turns on automatically when battery life reaches a (customizable, of course) critical level. The energy-saver limits CPU cycles, turns off NFC, Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, cellular data, account sync, vibration, and haptic feedback, and it can limit the maximum brightness of the AMOLED display and its auto-off timer. Then you can just go back to worry-free tweeting on the back of your phone.

It's an expensive phone for sure. (Two screens! That doesn't come cheap.) But the dual-display configuration is so useful and so well-managed, it's really a knockout feature.